Listening with Black Lives Matter

“Listening with Black Lives Matter” is a series of Lacanian-adjacent responses to/analyses of the current Black Lives Matter moment. Psychoanalysis and Lacanian analysis has a mixed history with respect to race, colonialism, and anti-black racism (one that Sheldon George and Derek Hook address with the new Lacan and Race collection forthcoming from Palgrave), so this might be an opportunity to demonstrate what a political-critical theory approach related to psychoanalysis might offer in the present moment. Indeed, even the rubric of “listening to…” could be questioned, for the very modus operandi of psychoanalysis, the talking cure, proximate as it is to the demands that non-racialized people, non-black people, listen, suggests that listening itself can be a power move, is imbricated with desire and misrecognition. We are intentionally beginning by reaching out to racialized and Indigenous critics, mindful that it should not be incumbent upon them/yourselves to (yet again) explain racism or colonialism to white audiences, but also to create space for your/their voices and viewpoints. Click on the title to access the text...

Black Lives Matter and the End of Identity Politics by Zahi Zalloua

Decolonizing Paranoia: The Michael Nehass Case by Patricia Barkaskas & Clint Burnham

The accosted and the aggressor by S. Alfonso Williams

Not All Lives Matter by Robert K. Beshara

Post-Colonial Policing by Samir Gandesha (first appeared on openDemocracy.net, Splinters: July)

Familiar Foreigners by Corinne Mitsuye Sugino

On White Rioters & Black Liberals by Charles Athanasopoulos